Vegetation management will help to safeguard embankments

Your picture overlooking the ‘shrinking’ clay embankment between Tisbury and Gillingham surely tells its own story (RAIL 965).

Here we have a low embankment formerly carrying a double-track main line, along which the Class 159 (shown on the now single line) has to squeeze between lines of trees that simply didn’t exist for the first hundred years of the railways’ existence.

Climate change almost certainly contributes to the current problems, but it’s no secret that trees suck huge amounts of moisture from the surrounding soil. A ‘programme of research’ (at who knows what cost) isn’t really needed to establish that trees, as much as climate, are responsible for what is happening around the network.

The Victorian engineers who built the well-engineered railway between Salisbury and Exeter weren’t stupid. They understood all this but saw no need to design cuttings and embankments to bear the weight and insatiable thirst of large trees.

It would have been inconceivable to them that one day accountants, rather than engineers, would run the railway and that vegetation management would be abandoned.

The trouble is, we now have a whole industry making money from rediscovering what the Victorians already knew. And we’re all likely to end up the poorer because of it, since the £15 billion to £20bn estimated to rebuild every embankment simply isn’t there.

A measured amount of vegetation management now must surely be the way forward to at least mitigate the problems we have.

Mike Bussell, Yeovil